


Two-Body Problem

by heavvymetalqueen



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: F/F, mentions of joy/sorrow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-11
Updated: 2016-11-11
Packaged: 2018-08-30 09:10:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8527342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heavvymetalqueen/pseuds/heavvymetalqueen
Summary: Written for the prompt: "first time"The two-body problem is defined in mechanics as  "the attempt to determine the motion of two point particles that interact only with each other"





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mightyscrub](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mightyscrub/gifts).



The first time she sees her, Joy is surprised. She expected to be the only woman allowed at the highest levels. She knew there were women at NASA, she wasn’t naive, but she also knew they all were in the stuffy basements of the facility, crunching the numbers their male colleagues couldn’t be bothered with until their eyes lost their sight.

But _she_ isn’t. She’s dressed in masculine clothes - pressed, blindingly white shirt and black slacks, bright red tie - but she’s unmistakeably feminine in a way Joy would never be, not even before war stripped all of the woman out of the hero.

The first time Strangelove looks at her, Joy feels something in her gut she thought had been carved out along with her Adamska, bled out of her barren body into battlefield mud.

As she meets her almost transparent eyes over her oversized sunglasses, Joy swallows, and knows her mission has suddenly become both more pleasant and harder than she was expecting it to be.

***

The first time they talk, she feels stupid. Not something she gets to feel often, the awareness of being a blockheaded, heavy handed grunt. She’s used to be measures smarter than her male colleagues.

But she is _smart_ , impossibly so, and not condescending at all about it, explaining things to her in layman’s terms without sighing or eyerolling even though she would be justified in doing so.

For all her efforts, all Joy can truly concentrate on is the mole by her lips and how much she wants to kiss it.

She misses most of her talk about gravitational pull, but she isn’t too broken up about it.

***

The first time she realizes she’s screwed is when they run into each other in an hallway one night, her towelling her hair and recovering from a training a little too heavy for her age and Strangelove with a sharpie behind her ear and the rumples in her labcoat that say she’s in the middle of a crunch.

“Long session?” asks Strangelove with a kind smile.

She catches her eyes through the dimmed lenses, running over her body with no shame, dragging on the spots of her shirt where it’s stretched wetly across her breasts and hips. Heat crawls up her stomach and chest, glues her tongue against the roof of her mouth and all she can do is nod.

“I’m taking a tea break before I snap. Care to join me?”

She nods again.

She follows her to her office, accepts the steaming cup, fumbles with the spoon and the milk and the chair even though she doesn’t fumble, she _never_ fumbles - the only one who could make her fumble was him, and she was a kid then, green and wet behind the ears and he was so _gorgeous_....

She’s fifteen years Strangelove’s senior and she’s seen and lost so much since then but the fluttery feeling in her chest when their hands touch across the milk bottle hasn’t changed.

Strangelove talks of the stars, and of orbits and numbers as if they’re her friends, and she listens, rapt and tired, knowing that no matter what, she’ll find her way back to earth, now.

***

The first time they kiss, it’s Strangelove that initiates it.

Joy is so relieved she laughs nervously on her lips, and for a moment Strangelove pulls back, scared that she’s laughing at her, before Joy wraps her arms around her thin waist and pulls, and tastes her dark lipstick, and they fall into each other. And onto the floor of her office, which ends up being the place where they make love for the first time, as well.

Afterwards she brazenly runs her soft fingertips along the serpent scar as they lie on their discarded clothes on the cold metal floor. Joy tells her what came out of it, her only son and what little was left of the woman in her.

“You’re still plenty a woman, Boss,” she whispers, and kisses the tip of the snake.

“Joy,” she says. “Call me Joy.”

“Is that your real name?”

She has long forgotten her real name, and it has never mattered anyway. Joy was what the last person who loved her called her, and _that_ still matters. “Close enough.”

Strangelove breathes her real name in her ear, a small treasure she doesn’t allow the sharks surrounding her at all times to use. No man may have power over her, but she gives it freely to Joy.

Joy kisses that name into her skin and in her mouth and between her trembling thighs over and over, till the morning washes over their exhausted bodies.

***

That name is the first word that slips hoarsely through a throat that feels like broken glass when she emerges from her long, agonizing dream of fire and crushing water, stars still embedded in her eyes, the blue of Earth still scorched on her heart.

She is there in a breath, her hands soft on her burned skin, her tears burning her palm when she cups her cheek.

“I saw the stars,” she croaks, already feeling her consciousness fade, “sorry I couldn’t take any back for you.”

“You took back the only thing I needed,” she says as Joy’s eyes droop again.

She saw the stars, and they were beautiful, but none of them had her beautiful, strange lover on them, and she couldn’t stay.

For the first time, she was selfish and fought to come back.

She will pay for it soon.

But for now, she sleeps, knowing she’ll be by her side when she wakes, and that she’s on the best possible planet she could be on.


End file.
